I remember playing the demo for Independence War 2 a long while back, and I absolutely loved how the sector-to-sector jumping in the game had no transitions. The planets and suns would go past you as you traversed through a solar system.

This time would be put to use loading the destination sector. I found the whole thing much more immersive than a loading screen.

I can probably guess that the current engine can't support this at the moment, but it'd be a nice-to-have in the future.

If we take the approach that a ship is phased out of real-space during a jump (saw this during my searching), one would not have to worry about flying through asteroid sectors (but it might look pretty cool). Their ship would simply turn to the direction of their destination and jump out (rather than fly off in some random direction)

Think of what different jumps would look like:

- Getting interrupted by an ion storm would present the player with a sudden wall of purple ions and your jump would grind to a halt.

- Flying into a sector would start maybe 10km out and the ship would decelerate to the jump point (this could happen within 1 or 2 seconds, so as not to give players much of an advantage of seeing what's going on before they're visible)

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Obviously there are some implications with the current sector setup: Since sectors are mostly 10-20 sq km populated cubes, the 'real' size of each system would only be 160-320km across... not very realistic... getting the look of the jumps to mesh well with a realistically sized system maybe only 100 au across would be tough.

Anyway, food for thought.

The major problem with this is that you would have to load every sector on your path in order to display it. This might not be so bad for those people with good connections but if someone has a low throughput they'll be sitting there for 5 min waiting for the 10 secotors they jumped across to load (assuming in the mean time they were watching the sector right before that fly by).

I actually did some more thinking about this after I posted.

I figured the best way would be to have a 'low-detail' model of the entire sector (just planets, major asteroid fields, stuff like that).

So rather than load every sector, you'd go 'through' them without actually seeing the sector contents, you'd really only be flying through the 'low-detail' version of the system. It'd be the same as the system we have now where you just pop into your destination... just instead you actually have something cooler to watch while your destination loads instead of a loading screen :)

actually I seem to recall the devs wanting to do something similar to this at one time. The problem is that vendetta is single threaded, and to load the new sector AND display any form of smooth video transition requires a double threaded process that the engine just cant handle as it is now. I think this is still on the "to do sometime down the road when I have time" list. (or maybe when andy or ray gets completely bored with whatever they are supposed to be working on)

Ah, boredom. Where would we be without it?
-:sigma.SB